Calvaire (2004): C

Belgian filmmaker Fabrice Du Welz proves he’s both a devoted student of the horror genre and uninterested in bringing anything new to it with Calvaire (“The Ordeal”), the latest torture-obsessed film to thrust a middle-class innocent into a backwoods heart-of-darkness. As with Alejandro Aja’s High Tension, Welz’s directorial debut is an aesthetically polished but soulless affair, getting the damp, moldy atmosphere of his forest-enshrouded setting right and yet never generating any gripping momentum that might help overshadow his premise’s familiarity. After a Christmas performance at a home for the elderly, traveling singer Marc (Laurent Lucas) receives two awkward romantic entreaties, both of which foreshadow the far more demented sexual advances directed his way after his van breaks down in the countryside and he finds himself holed up at a remote inn. The establishment’s proprietor Bartel (Jackie Berroyer) intends to make Marc a permanent stand-in for his long-gone spouse, a madness that Welz – via some cow-sodomizing hillbillies (led by High Tension and I Stand Alone’s Philippe Nahon) and a wacko wandering the woods in search of his missing dog – tiresomely portrays as indicative of non-urbanites. For Calvaire, rural folk are Deliverance-style savages, potential saviors turn out to be no different than the lunatics, and Marc is some sort of Christ figure forced to suffer for vague reasons. The result is simply a glossy rehash that’s far less interesting and frightening than the classics upon which it’s unimaginatively modeled – save, however, for a bar scene that culminates with a simultaneously hilarious and unsettling Dance of the Deranged.